[anonymars]

I looked into China Airlines 006 a bit more (https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/falling-from-the-sky-the...). It's pretty wild how it went and how badly the pilots lost situational awareness. But, sure enough:

> "In trying to explain why Ho never took this critical step and subsequently failed to notice the plane’s increasing bank, the NTSB looked at two areas: fatigue, and overreliance on automation. Regarding the latter, investigators noted that during cruise flight, the job of a Boeing 747 pilot is to monitor the automation, not to fly the airplane. Studies have shown that humans are naturally poor monitors of automation, because it’s boring and does not actively engage our brains and bodies. As a result, when something goes wrong, the brain has to “wake up” before it can assess the situation and take corrective action. Therefore, when flying on autopilot pilots have increased reaction times to unexpected events, as opposed to flying manually, when a sudden change in the state of the aircraft can be instinctively assessed using physical cues transmitted via the control column."

So who knows what we can do. I've definitely experienced this to varying degrees with the fancier cruise controls (e.g. "Autopilot"). It's one thing to just take pressure off the gas and/or steering wheel, but another entirely when you aren't actively "driving the car" at full attention anymore.